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RSR: Steve Austin on Mount St. Helens

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* Famed Geologist Dr. Steven Austin on RSF: On this special edition of Real Science Radio, Bob Enyart interviews the senior research scientist from the Institute for Creation Research, Dr. Steven Austin, about his groundbreaking research at Mt. St. Helens, research which forced the hand of the National Park Service to remove their infamous sign about the petrified trees at Yellowstone, and which formed an important part of the pressure forcing geologists to incorporate catastrophism back into their understanding of Earth's past. In the 1990s, Dr. Austin produced the extraordinary video, Mount St. Helens: Explosive Evidence for Catastrophe.

* NG Quotes Scientist on Expectations vs Actuality: The May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hardrock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousand of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." As for the volcano itself, while the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers is to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old (see rsr.org/not-so-old-things), this atheistic magazine acknowledges the evidence, that Mount St. Helens, that is, the volcano itself, is only about 4,000 years old! See below.

2012 UPDATE: Check out rememberthenautiloids.com or just enjoy this stunning video about rapid strata deposition at the Grand Canyon as evidenced by the high-energy burial of millions of nautiloid fossils in limestone, 15% of which are standing on their heads! Of this one-hour video, the must-see part is the 22 minutes from 16:12 to 38:48, which will play automatically right here. You'll love it!

* RSR ERROR -- Retracted Claim re: Engineer's Canyon: Bob Enyart, host of Real Science Radio, retracts the claim he made in 2012 regarding the formation of Engineer's Canyon in the state of Washington. (Tracking this error back, it's been repeated for decades, including relatively recently in 2011 at 45:10 into one of Dr. Austin's presentations. So we have notified Dr. Austin about this correction.) RSR contacted a scientist who for many years has been teaching graduate courses on remote (satellite, etc.) sensing. We asked Dr. Ed Holroyd of Denver, Colorado's Metropolitan State University to review our claimed explanation for Engineer's Canyon. Dr. Holroyd's careful 10-page report, An analysis of the canyons in the Toutle River, states on page 6 regarding "The Engineers Canyon (EC) and 'Little Grand Canyon' (LGC)" that, "These already existed at the time of this [1982] image, and so the continued pumping [from then] through 1985 did not carve these canyons..." Our original statement, now retracted, stated: "Many people asked to explain the photo on the right might claim that over millions of years that small stream eroded the canyon. In reality, Engineers' Canyon, on the north edge of the Toutle River valley just west of Spirit Lake, eroded in the early 1980s over a period of two years." Our statement was based on a incorrect claim by others that a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' drainage project there had eroded the canyon.

* Mount St. Helens Only 4000 Years Old: The May 2000 issue of National Geographic says about Mount St. Helens, "the volcano we see today was built during the past 4,000 years." Of course the editors of National Geographic believe that the Earth is billions of years old, and that every part of its surface, including under this volcano, has experienced tectonic activity for all that time. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note, and it fits in with the pattern of evidence over at RSR's List of Not So Old Things, that the evidence indicates that one of the largest active volcanos in the U.S. was formed in only about 4,000 years. Because old-earthers reflexively claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, it is refreshing to see National Geographic acknowledge Mount St. Helen's youth, so bluntly.